Welcome to the ISCB Community News Blog

This blog collects news, announcements or other information which could be of interest to our ISCB members. We are a group ISCB members who volunteer to populate this blog on a regular basis. In case you want to become an "ISCB-News Reporter" yourself, let us know: contact ISCBDon't repost copyrighted content! The guidelines are:- Include a link to the source page- Include a short summary about the article. You can quote up to ONE paragraph from the original story, but not more- Don't repost an entire articles originating from another source- Never post content without attribution — always include the sourceTo post a news, please use this form.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Call for Site Proposals: ACM-BCB 2012Site proposals for the Third ACM Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (ACM-BCB 2012) are invited from interested groups. ACM-BCB is the official conference of the ACM SIG Bioinformatics (http://www.sigbioinformatics.org/ ) . Site proposals should be no longer than 2 page ASCII text (66 lines, 80 columns). Proposals must be submitted by email to the current ACM SIG Bioinformatics Director of Conferences (Vasant Honavar, honavar@cs.iastate.edu) with the subject: "ACM-BCB site proposal - YEAR" (e.g., "ACM-BCB site proposal - 2012") no later than May 31, 2011. The venue for ACM-BCB 2012 will be announced during ACM-BCB 2011 which is being held in Chicago (http://acmbcb.org/ )Site proposals should cover the following topics:• Geographic Region: For 2012, the preferred location is North America. In the future, we will consider rotating the location to other regions (Europe, Asia, etc.)• Potential dates: Potential dates should be chosen so as to avoid conflicts with major conferences in related areas (ISMB, BIBM, CSB, BIBE, RECOMB, etc.)• Site city:➢ The city should be located near a major airport, within 1-2 hours of regular train service and/or 45 minutes of cab/shuttle service. The airport should be served at least two airlines with regular service through a major international airport to the 4 major continents of SIG Bioinformatics attendees: Asia, Europe, North and South America.➢ The city should have one or more conference venues that can accommodate conferences with 300-600 attendees, including suitable facilities for 4-6 concurrent tutorials or workshops with up to 100 attendees each. The venues should include facilities with one to 3 large center screens, with unobstructed views, and projectors and audiovisual equipment appropriate for plenary sessions. The venue should include suitable reception and banquet facilities. Please do NOT contact possible venues regarding availability or cost. ACM negotiates the cost, availability, and contracts directly with candidate venues. However, you may include estimates based on your knowledge of recent conferences, especially ACM conferences (if any), held at the venues under consideration. A sample list of possible venues with a 1-line description addressing logistics (time to get there, need for transportation) would be useful. The availability of low-cost or subsidized venues e.g., the conference facilit ies at a major university would be a plus.➢ The city should have hotels that can house 500-700 people (attendees and their guests) within easy access to the possible venue. The availability of inexpensive accommodations for student participants is a plus.• Conference Organizers:➢ The proposal must include the name and affiliation of an active member of the SIG Bioinformatics community based in or very close to the proposed site city who is willing to serve as general chair; this may eventually require a statement of support from the chair's institution, and possibly administrative and organizational support.➢ The proposal may include: 2 co-chairs, one of whom must be local; The names and affiliations of a few other candidates that the chair can enlist to serve on the committee, notably a local person as local arrangements chair, a publicity chair, treasurer, etc.➢ The proposal must not include the names of program committee chairs (The ACM SIG Bioinformatics Board of Directors will select the program chairs).• Dates and conflicts: Please indicate which dates have conflicts with major local events, etc. that could interfere with the availability of either the proposed site or the proposed conference organizers. The proposed dates should consider conflicts with major conferences on related topics (ISMB, AAAI, IEEE BIBE, IEEE BIBM, RECOMB, PSB, etc.) The dates of ACM-BCB will ultimately be selected by the SIG Bioinformatics Executive Committee, based on the proposals received and feedback from surveys conducted by SIG Bioinformatics. URL: http://www.sigbioinformatics.org/

Thursday, April 21, 2011

We are happy to announce a writing contest for beginner-friendly articles on bioinformatics. The web magazine http://en.bioinformatyk.eu collects articles for bioinformatics students that are easy to understand. You are welcome to participate by contributing a short article about a topic of your choice, e.g.:

You don't need to describe original research (we'd even suggest you save this up for your first paper). What matters more important is to explain bioinformatics in a clear or entertaining way.

To submit an article, prepare a MS Word, OpenOffice or PDF document with your text in English (200-1000 words). Prepare eventual figures as separate files (.jpg or .png). Finally send everything by email to contest[at]bioinformatyk.eu - We will take care of the rest.

The submission deadline for the contest is September 18th, 2011.

Remember that you need to have copyright of everything you are submitting. Also, if your article contains results from your research, please make sure that your supervisor agrees with that.

The best articles will be awarded by an international board of referees:

The First IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics, Imaging and Systems Biology now invites proposals for tutorials and demonstrations at the conference to be held in San Jose, July 26-29, 2011.

The purpose of tutorials is to provide a comprehensive overview by subject matter experts on topics relevant to HISB, keeping in mind the inter-disciplinary audience. The purpose of demos is to give researchers the opportunity to showcase the state of the art in areas relevant to HISB. Industrial exhibitors may also demonstrate their products through demos as long as they are relevant to the topic areas of the main conference.

We encourage submissions of tutorial and demonstration proposals on all topics relevant to the conference in the general areas of healthcare informatics, biomedical imaging, bioinformatics, and systems biology. A full list of topics is available in the call for papers for HISB at (http://www.ieee-hisb.org). Specialized subtopics that address computational or clinical aspects of the main topics will also be considered.Please refer to the main conference site (http://www.ieee-hisb.org) for further details.